Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time

ABBREVIATIONS

PART I

The Seeds of Revolt, 1821–1849

CHAPTER 1

Prelude

The last years of the reign of Alexander I were a troubled, uncertain, and gloomy time in Russian history. Alexander had come to the throne as the result of a palace revolution against his father, Paul I, whose increasingly erratic and insensate rule led his entourage to suspect madness. The coup was carried out with at least the implicit consent of Alexander, whose accession to power, after his father’s murder, at first aroused great hopes of liberal reform in the small, enlightened segment of Russian society. Alexander’s tutor, selected by his grandmother Catherine the Great, had been a Swiss of advanced liberal views named La Harpe. This partisan of the Enlightenment imbued his royal pupil with republican and even democratic ideas; and during the first years of his reign, Alexander surrounded himself with a band of young aristocrats sharing his progressive persuasions. A good deal of work was done preparing plans for major social reforms, such as the abolition of serfdom and the granting of personal civil rights to all members of the population. Alexander’s attention, however, was soon diverted from internal affairs by the great drama then proceeding on the European stage—the rise of Napoleon as a world-conqueror. Allied at first with Napoleon, and then becoming his implacable foe, Alexander I led his people in the great national upsurge that resulted in the defeat of the Grand Army and its hitherto invincible leader.

The triumph over Napoleon brought Russian armies to the shores of the Atlantic and exposed both officers and men (the majority of the troops were peasant serfs) to prolonged contact with the relative freedom and amenities of life in Western Europe. It was expected that, in reward for the loyalty of his people, Alexander would make some spectacular gesture consonant with his earlier intentions and institute the social reforms that had been put aside to meet the menace of Napoleon. But the passage of time, and the epochal events he had lived through, had not left Alexander unchanged. More and more he had come under the influence of the religious mysticism and irrationalism so prevalent in the immediate post-Napoleonic era. Instead of reforms, the period between 1820 and 1825 saw an intensification of reaction and the repression of any overt manifestation of liberal ideas and tendencies in Russia.

Meanwhile, secret societies—some moderate in their aims, others more radical—had begun to form among the most brilliant and cultivated cadres of the Russian officers’ corps. These societies, grouping the scions of some of the most important aristocratic families, sprang from impatience with Alexander’s dilatoriness and a desire to transform Russia on the model of Western liberal and democratic ideas. Alexander died unexpectedly in November 1825, and the societies seized the opportunity a month later, at the time of the coronation of Nicholas I, to launch a pitifully abortive eight-hour uprising known to history as the Decembrist insurrection. An apocryphal story about this event has it that the mutinous troops, told to shout for "Constantine and konstitutsiya" (Constantine, the older brother of Nicholas, had renounced the throne and had a reputation as a liberal), believed that the second noun, whose gender in Russian is feminine, referred to Constantine’s wife. Whether true or only a witticism, the story highlights the isolation of the aristocratic rebels; and their revolution was crushed with a few whiffs of grapeshot by the new tsar, who condemned five of the ringleaders to be hanged and thirty-one to be exiled to Siberia for life. Nicholas thus provided the nascent Russian intelligentsia with its first candidates for the new martyrology that would soon replace the saints of the Orthodox Church.

Feodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky was born in Moscow on October 3, 1821, just a few years before this crucial event in Russian history, and these events were destined to be interwoven with his life in the most intimate fashion. The world in which Dostoevsky grew up lived in the shadow of the Decembrist insurrection and suffered from the harsh police-state atmosphere instituted by Nicholas I to ensure that nothing similar could occur again. The Decembrist insurrection marked the opening skirmish in the long and deadly duel between the Russian intelligentsia and the supreme aristocratic power that shaped the course of Russian history and culture in Dostoevsky’s lifetime. And it was out of the inner moral and spiritual crises of this intelligentsia—out of its self-alienation and its desperate search for new values on which to found its life—that the child born in Moscow at the conclusion of the reign of Alexander I would one day produce his great novels.

CHAPTER 2

The Family

Of all the great Russian writers of the first part of the nineteenth century—Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, Herzen, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Nekrasov—Dostoevsky was the only one who did not come from a family belonging to the landed gentry. This is a fact of great importance, and influenced the view he took of his own position as a writer. Comparing himself with his great rival Tolstoy, as he did frequently in later life, Dostoevsky defined the latter’s work as being that of a historian, not a novelist. For, in his view, Tolstoy depicted the life which existed in the tranquil and stable, long-established Moscow landowners’ family of the middle-upper stratum. Such a life, with its settled traditions of culture and fixed moral-social norms, had become in the nineteenth century that of only a small minority of Russians; it was the life of the exceptions. The life of the majority, on the other hand, was one of confusion and moral chaos. Dostoevsky felt that his own work was an attempt to grapple with the chaos of the present, while Tolstoy’s Childhood, Boyhood, Youth and War and Peace (he had these specifically in mind) were pious efforts to enshrine for posterity the beauty of a gentry life already vanishing and doomed to extinction.¹

Such a self-definition, made at a later stage of Dostoevsky’s career, of course represents the distillation of many years of reflection on his literary position. But it also throws a sharp light back on Dostoevsky’s past, and helps us to see that his earliest years were spent in an atmosphere that prepared him to become the chronicler of the moral consequences of flux and change, and of the breakup of the traditional forms of Russian life. The lack, during his early years, of a unified social tradition in which he could feel at home unquestionably shaped his imaginative vision, and we can also discern a rankling uncertainty about status that helps to explain his acute understanding of the psychological scars inflicted by social inequality.

On his father’s side, the Dostoevskys had been a family belonging to the Lithuanian nobility. The family name came from a small village (Dostoevo, in the district of Pinsk) awarded to an ancestor in the sixteenth century. Falling on hard times, the Orthodox Dostoevskys sank into the lowly class of the non-monastic clergy. Dostoevsky’s paternal great-grandfather was a Uniat archpriest in the Ukrainian town of Bratslava; his grandfather was a priest of the same persuasion; and this is where his father was born. The Uniat denomination was a compromise worked out by the Jesuits as a means of proselytizing among the predominantly Orthodox peasantry of the region: Uniats continued to celebrate the Orthodox rites, but accepted the supreme authority of the pope.

Since the non-monastic clergy in Russia form a caste rather than a profession or a calling, Dostoevsky’s father was naturally destined to follow the same career as his father. But, after graduating from a seminary at the age of fifteen, he slipped away from home, made his way to Moscow, and there gained admittance to the Imperial Medical-Surgical Academy in 1809. Assigned to service in a Moscow hospital during the campaign of 1812, he continued to serve in various posts as a military doctor until 1821, when, aged thirty-two, he accepted a position at the Mariinsky Hospital for the Poor, located on the outskirts of Moscow. His official advancement in the service of the state was steady, and in April 1828, being awarded the order of St. Anna third class for especially zealous service,² he was promoted to the rank of collegiate assessor. This entitled him to the legal status of noble in the official Russian class system, and he hastened to establish his claim to its privileges. On June 28, 1828, he inscribed his own name and that of his two sons, Mikhail and Feodor (aged eight and seven, respectively), in the rolls of the hereditary nobility of Moscow.

Dr. Dostoevsky had thus succeeded, with a good deal of determination and tenacity, in pulling himself up by his bootstraps and rising from the despised priestly class to that of civil servant, member of a learned profession, and nobleman. It is clear from the memoirs of Dostoevsky’s younger brother Andrey—our only reliable source for these early years—that the children had been informed about the family’s ancient patent of nobility, and looked on their father’s recent elevation as a just restoration of their rightful rank.³ The Dostoevskys thought of themselves as belonging to the old gentry aristocracy rather than to the new service nobility created by Peter the Great—the class to which, in fact, their father had just acceded. Their actual place in society was in flagrant contradiction to this flattering self-image.

Medicine was an honorable but not very honorific profession in Russia, and Dr. Dostoevsky’s salary, which he was forced to supplement with private practice, was barely enough for his needs. The Dostoevskys lived in a small, cramped apartment on the hospital grounds, and living space was always a problem. Mikhail and Feodor slept in a windowless compartment separated by a partition from the antechamber; the oldest girl, Varvara, slept on a couch in the living room; the younger children spent the nights in the bedroom of the parents. It is true, as Andrey notes, that his family had a staff of six servants (a coachman, a so-called lackey, a cook, a housemaid, a laundress, and a nyanya or governess for the children), but this should not be taken as an indication of affluence. From Andrey’s comment on the lackey, who was really a dvornik or janitor, we see how eager the Dostoevskys were to keep up appearances and conform to the gentry style of life. His job was to supply the stoves with wood in winter and to bring water for tea from a fountain two versts distant from the hospital, but when Marya Feodorovna went to town on foot, he put on livery and a three-cornered hat and walked proudly behind his mistress. When she used the coach, the livery appeared again and the lackey stood impressively on the back footboard. This was the unbreakable rule of Moscow etiquette in those days,⁴ Andrey remarks wryly. Dostoevsky certainly remembered this rule, and his parents’ adherence to its prescripts, when Mr. Golyadkin in The Double hires a carriage and a livery for his barefoot servant Petrushka in order to increase his social standing in the eyes of the world.

The Dostoevskys’ pretensions to gentry status were wistfully incongruous with their true position in society. Dostoevsky would one day compare Alexander Herzen, born (even if out of wedlock) into the very highest stratum of the ruling class, with the critic Vissarion Belinsky, who was "not a gentilhomme at all! Oh no! (God knows from whom he descended! His father, it seems, was a military surgeon)."⁵ So, of course, was Dostoevsky’s, and the remark indicates what he learned to perceive as the reality of his family’s situation. Dr. Dostoevsky and his offspring would never enjoy the consideration to which they felt entitled by right of descent from noble forebears.

While stationed at a Moscow hospital in 1819, the thirty-year-old Dr. Dostoevsky must have mentioned to a colleague that he was seeking a suitable bride. For he was then introduced to the family of Feodor Nechaev, a well-to-do Moscow merchant with an attractive nineteen-year-old daughter, Marya Feodorovna. Marriages in those days, especially in the merchant class, were not left to chance or inclination. Dr. Dostoevsky, after being approved by the parents, was probably allowed to catch a glimpse of his future bride in church, and then invited to meet her after he agreed to a betrothal; the introduction to the girl was the sign of consent, and the future bride had nothing to say about the matter. Both Dr. Dostoevsky and his new in-laws were similar in having risen from lowly origins to a higher position on the Russian social scale.

1. Dr. M. A. Dostoevsky

2. Mme M. F. Dostoevsky

The older sister of Dostoevsky’s mother, Alexandra Feodorovna, had married into a merchant family much like her own. Her husband, A. M. Kumanin, had risen to fill various official functions, and the Kumanins were among those merchant families whose wealth allowed them to compete with the gentry in the opulence of their lifestyle. The proud and touchy Dr. Dostoevsky, who probably felt superior to his brother-in-law both by birth and by education, had to swallow his pride and appeal to him for financial succor on several occasions. Dostoevsky’s own attitude to his Kumanin relatives, whom he always regarded as vulgarians concerned only with money, no doubt reflected a view he had picked up from his father. In a letter to Mikhail just after hearing of his father’s death, Dostoevsky tells him to spit on those insignificant little souls⁶ (meaning their Moscow relatives), who were incapable of understanding higher things. Andrey speaks of the Kumanins warmly; they looked after the younger Dostoevsky orphans as if they had been their own children. But though Dostoevsky too later appealed to them for aid at critical moments in his life, he never referred to them in private without a tinge of contempt.

Dostoevsky always spoke of his mother with great warmth and affection; and the picture that emerges from the memoir material shows her to have been an engaging and attractive person. Like her husband, Marya Feodorovna had assimilated a good bit of the culture of the gentry. In a letter, she describes her character as being one of natural gaiety,⁷ and this inborn sunniness, although sorely tried by the strains of domestic life, shines through everything that we know about her. She was not only a loving and cheerful mother but also an efficient manager of the affairs of the family. Three years after Dr. Dostoevsky became a nobleman, he used his newly acquired right to own land to purchase a small estate about 150 versts from Moscow called Darovoe. A year later, the Dostoevskys hastened to acquire an adjacent property—the hamlet of Cheremoshnia—whose purchase caused them to go heavily into debt. No doubt the acquisition of a landed estate with peasant serfs seemed to make good business sense to the doctor, and it was a place where his family could spend the summer in the open air. But in the back of his mind there was probably also the desire to give some concrete social embodiment to his dream of becoming a member of the landed gentry. It was Marya Feodorovna, however, who went to the country every spring to supervise the work; the doctor himself could get away from his practice only on flying visits.

Located on poor farming land, which did not even furnish enough fodder for the livestock, the Dostoevsky estate yielded only a miserable existence to its peasant population, but as long as Marya Feodorovna was in charge things did not go too badly. During the first summer she managed, by a system of canals, to bring water into the village from a nearby spring to feed a large pond, which she then stocked with fish sent from Moscow by her husband. The peasants could water their livestock more easily, the children could amuse themselves by fishing, and the food supply was augmented. She was also a humane and kindhearted proprietor who distributed grain for sowing to the poorest peasants in early spring when they had none of their own, even though this was considered to be bad estate management. Dr. Dostoevsky reprimands her several times in his letters for not being more severe. Almost a hundred years later, the legend of her leniency and compassion still persisted among the descendants of the peasants of Darovoe.⁸ It was no doubt from Marya Feodorovna that Dostoevsky first learned to feel that sympathy for the unfortunate and deprived that became so important for his work.

Dostoevsky’s father, Mikhail Andreevich, forms a strong contrast in character to his wife. His portrait shows him to have had coarse and heavy features. His dress uniform, with its high, stiff, gilded collar, gives an air of rigidity to the set of his head that is barely offset by the faintest of smiles; and the rigidity was much more typical of the man than was the trace of affability. He was a hardworking medical practitioner whose ability was so appreciated by his superiors that, when he decided to retire, he was offered a substantial promotion to change his mind. He was also a faithful husband, a responsible father, and a believing Christian. These qualities did not make him either a lovable or an appealing human being, but his virtues were as important as his defects in determining the environment in which Dostoevsky grew up.

Dr. Dostoevsky suffered from some sort of nervous affliction that strongly affected his character and disposition. Bad weather always brought on severe headaches and resulted in moods of gloom and melancholy; the return of good weather relieved his condition. Dostoevsky later traced the incidence of his own epileptic attacks to such climatic changes. If Dr. Dostoevsky was, as even Andrey is forced to concede, very exacting and impatient, and, most of all, very irritable,⁹ this can be attributed to the extreme and unremitting state of nervous tension induced by his illness. Dostoevsky, who inherited this aspect of his father’s character, constantly complained in later life about his own inability to master his nerves, and was also given to uncontrollable explosions of temper.

Dr. Dostoevsky was thus a naggingly unhappy man whose depressive tendencies colored every aspect of his life. They made him suspicious and mistrustful, and unable to find satisfaction in either his career or his family. He suspected the household servants of cheating, and watched over them with a cranky surveillance characteristic of his attitude toward the world in general. He believed that he was being unfairly treated in the service and that his superiors were reaping the benefits of his unrewarded labors in the hospital. Even if both of these conjectures may have had some basis in fact, he brooded over them in a manner quite out of proportion to their real importance. His relations with the Kumanins were also a continual source of vexation, because his pride filled him with an impotent bitterness at his feelings of inferiority. This acute social sensitivity is another trait transmitted from father to son; many Dostoevsky characters will be tormented by the unflattering image of themselves that they see reflected in the eyes of others.

What sustained Mikhail Andreevich in the midst of his woes was, first and foremost, the unstinting and limitless devotion of his wife. But in his very darkest moments, when no earthly succor seemed available, he took refuge in the conviction of his own virtue and rectitude, and in the belief that God was on his side against a hostile or indifferent world. In Moscow, he writes to his wife on returning from the country, I found waiting for me only trouble and vexation; and I sit brooding with my head in my hands and grieve, there is no place to lay my head, not to mention anyone with whom I can share my sorrow; but God will judge them because of my misery.¹⁰ This astonishing conviction that he was one of God’s elect, this unshakable self-assurance that he was among the chosen, constituted the very core of Dr. Dostoevsky’s being. It was this that made him so self-righteous and pharisaical, so intolerant of the smallest fault, so persuaded that only perfect obedience from his family to all his wishes could compensate for all his toil and labor on their behalf.

While Dr. Dostoevsky may have made his family pay a heavy psychic price for his virtues, these virtues did exist as a fact of their daily lives. He was a conscientious father who devoted an unusual amount of his time to educating his children. In the early nineteenth century, corporal punishment was accepted as an indispensable means of instilling discipline, and in Russia the flogging and beating of both children and the lower classes was accepted as a matter of course. Dr. Dostoevsky, however, never struck any of his children, despite his irritability and his temper; the only punishment they had to fear was a verbal rebuke. It was to avoid having his children beaten that, though he could scarcely afford to do so, Dr. Dostoevsky sent them all to private schools rather than to public institutions. And even after his two older sons had gone away to study at military schools, Dr. Dostoevsky still continued to worry about them and to bombard them—as well as others, when his sons neglected to write—with inquiries about their welfare. If we disregard Dr. Dostoevsky’s personality and look only at the way he fulfilled his paternal responsibilities, we can understand a remark that Dostoevsky made in the late 1870s to his brother Andrey that their parents had been outstanding people, adding that such family men, such fathers . . . we ourselves are quite incapable of being, brother!¹¹

Despite the diversity of their characters, Dr. Dostoevsky and his wife were a devoted and loving couple. Their twenty years of marriage produced a family of eight children, and nobody reading their letters without parti pris can doubt that they were deeply attached to each other. Good-bye, my soul, my little dove, my happiness, joy of my life, I kiss you until I’m out of breath. Kiss the children for me.¹² So writes Dr. Dostoevsky to Marya Feodorovna after fourteen years of marriage, and while some allowances must be made for the florid rhetoric of the time, these words seem far in excess of what convention might require. Marya Feodorovna is equally lavish with her endearments. Make the trip here soon, my sweetheart, she writes from Darovoe, come my angel, my only wish is to have you visit me, you know that it’s the greatest holiday for me, the greatest pleasure in my life is when you’re with me.¹³

The letters of his parents reflect the image of a close-knit and united family, where concern for the children was in the foreground of the parents’ preoccupations. Nonetheless, Dr. Dostoevsky’s emotional insecurity was so great, his suspicion and mistrust of the world sometimes reached such a pathological pitch, that he could suspect his wife of infidelity. One such incident occurred in 1835, when he learned that she was pregnant. Andrey recalls seeing his mother break into hysterical weeping after having communicated some information to his father that surprised and vexed him. The scene, he explains, was probably caused by the announcement of his mother’s pregnancy. The letters indicate, however, that Dr. Dostoevsky was tormented by doubts about his wife’s faithfulness, although he made no direct accusations. Schooled by long experience, Marya Feodorovna was able to read his state of mind through the distraught tone of his letters and his deep mood of depression. My friend, she writes, thinking all this over, I wonder whether you are not tortured by that unjust suspicion, so deadly for us both, that I have been unfaithful to you.¹⁴

Her denial of any wrongdoing is written with an eloquence and expressiveness that even her second son might have envied. I swear, she writes, that my present pregnancy is the seventh and strongest bond of our mutual love, on my side a love that is pure, sacred, chaste and passionate, unaltered from the day of our marriage. There is also a fine sense of dignity in her explanation that she has never before deigned to reaffirm her marriage oath because I was ashamed to lower myself by swearing to my faithfulness during our sixteen years of marriage.¹⁵ Dr. Dostoevsky nonetheless remained adamant in his dark imaginings, accusing her of delaying her departure from the country so as to avoid returning to Moscow until it was too late to make the journey without risking a miscarriage. In reply, she writes sadly that time and years flow by, creases and bitterness spread over the face; natural gaiety of character is turned into sorrowful melancholy, and that’s my fate, that’s the reward for my chaste, passionate love; and if I were not strengthened by the purity of my conscience and my hope in Providence, the end of my days would be pitiful indeed.¹⁶

One could easily imagine the life of the Dostoevsky family being torn apart and subject to constant emotional upheaval, but nothing dramatic seems to have occurred. In this very letter, the current of ordinary life flows on as placidly as before. Information about the affairs of the estate are exchanged, and the older boys in Moscow append the usual loving postscript to their mother; there is no break in the family routine, and both partners, in the midst of recriminations, continue to assure the other of their undying love and devotion. Dr. Dostoevsky went to the country in July to assist at the delivery of Alexandra, and then, on returning in August, writes affectionately to his wife: Believe me, reading your letter, I tearfully thank God first of all, and you secondly, my dear. . . . I kiss your hand a million million times, and pray to God that you remain in good health for our happiness.¹⁷ Not a word recalls the tensions of the previous month; Marya Feodorovna’s soothing and loving presence seems to have worked wonders.

Displays of such extreme emotion between the parents were probably rare. Nothing was more important for the Dostoevskys than to present an image of well-bred propriety and gentry refinement to the world; it is impossible to imagine them in their cramped apartment, with a household staff in the kitchen and neighboring hospital families all around, indulging in the violent quarrels and scandalous outbursts that Dostoevsky later so often depicted in his novels. Dr. Dostoevsky probably alternated between a grim and ominous silence and endless censoriousness about the minutiae of daily life. His reluctance to speak out openly in the instance of Alexandra may be taken as typical, and when Marya Feodorovna stated the issue bluntly, he rebuked her for writing to him so directly and possibly revealing his secret suspicions to prying eyes. The impulse to cover and conceal is manifest, and was certainly operative in his personal behavior as well. It is therefore probable that the household in which Dostoevsky grew up was characterized far more by order, regularity, and routine, and by a deceptively calm surface of domestic tranquility, than by the familial chaos that so preoccupied him half a century later.

But we can hardly doubt that the gifted and perceptive boy would become aware of the stresses underlying the routine of his early years, and that he learned to feel it as beset with hidden antagonisms—as subject to extreme fluctuations between intimacy and withdrawal. Family life for Dostoevsky would always be a battleground and a struggle of wills, just as he had first learned to sense it from the secret life of his parents. And for a boy and youth destined to become famous for his understanding of the intricacies of human psychology, it was excellent training to have been reared in a household where the significance of behavior was kept hidden from view, and where his curiosity was stimulated to intuit and unravel its concealed meanings. One may perhaps see here the origin of Dostoevsky’s profound sense of the mystery of personality and his tendency to explore it, as it were, from the outside in, always moving from the exterior to deeper and deeper subterranean levels that are only gradually brought to light.

Life in the Dostoevsky family was carefully organized around the pattern of Dr. Dostoevsky’s daily routine. The family awakened promptly at six in the morning. At eight Dr. Dostoevsky went to the hospital and the children were put to their lessons. Dr. Dostoevsky returned around twelve and inquired about the work that had been accomplished, and lunch was served at one o’clock. After lunch a deathly silence was maintained for two hours while the paterfamilias napped on the couch in the living room before returning to the hospital. The evenings were spent in the living room, and each evening before dinner, if Dr. Dostoevsky was not too busy with his sick lists, he read aloud to the children. At nine in the evening the family had dinner, and the children, after saying their prayers in front of the icon, then went to bed. The day was spent in our family, Andrey comments, according to a routine established once and for all, and repeated day after day, very monotonously.¹⁸ Feodor was also subjected to this routine from his earliest years—one that combined the physical discomfort of crowded and gloomy quarters (low ceilings and cramped rooms crush the mind and the spirit, Raskolnikov tells Sonya) with the psychic discomfort of an unrelaxing pressure to work under the eye of a stern paternal overseer. The children were rarely allowed outdoors during the frigid Moscow winters.

During the periods of mild weather, the Dostoevsky family went for walks in the early evening. Dr. Dostoevsky was in charge of these excursions, and the children were held in with a tight rein; any display of exuberance or animal spirits was out of the question. Andrey describes him taking the occasion to give them lessons in geometry, using the crazy-quilt pattern of the Moscow streets to illustrate the various types of angle. The importance of hard work and self-discipline was constantly drummed into their minds, and though their father did not terrorize them physically, his impatient vigilance constantly hung over their heads as a threat. It is probable that, when Dostoevsky spoke to his friend Dr. Yanovsky in the late 1840s about the difficult and joyless circumstances of his childhood,¹⁹ he was thinking of circumstances such as these.

A great change occurred in the life of the Dostoevsky children when their parents acquired the small property at Darovoe in 1831. Feodor and Mikhail spent four months there with their mother every year for four years; after this time, because of their studies, they could come only for shorter stretches of a month or so. These were the sunniest periods in Dostoevsky’s boyhood. If he later told his second wife that he had had a happy and placid childhood,²⁰ it was undoubtedly of these months in the country that he was thinking, free from the menace of paternal disapproval and from the oppressive confinement of life in the city. Evocations of a happy childhood are exceedingly rare in Dostoevsky’s novels and the one or two that exist are set either in a village or on a country estate; no pleasant memories were linked in his sensibility with life in the city. Not only that first voyage to the village, Andrey writes, but all the following trips there always filled me with some kind of ecstatic excitement.²¹ No doubt the high-spirited and impressionable Feodor experienced the same sensation even more intensely as the carriage to Darovoe pulled away every spring with bells tinkling on the horses’ harness and as the at first unfamiliar (and then beloved) rural sights began to unroll before his eyes, until they finally arrived at the family’s thatched-roof, three-room cottage sheltered by a grove of ancient linden trees.

These sojourns in the country also offered Dostoevsky his first opportunity to become acquainted with the Russian peasantry at close quarters (the house serfs had acquired the manners and habits of servants). The children were allowed to roam freely and to enlist the aid of serf children in their games. The children were also allowed to mingle freely with the older peasants in the fields. Feodor once ran back two versts to the village, according to Andrey, to bring water to a peasant mother at work in the field who wished to give her baby a drink.²² This untroubled boyhood relation with the peasants certainly contributed to shaping Dostoevsky’s later social ideas; one may say that he aimed to bring about, on a national scale, the same harmonious unity between the educated classes and the peasantry that he remembered having known as a child. These childhood summers brought him—in the opinion of Dostoevsky’s friend Count Peter Semenov—closer to the peasantry, their way of life, and the entire moral physiognomy of the Russian people than most scions of the landed gentry, whose parents purposely kept them from any association with the peasants.²³

The country around Darovoe was crisscrossed with numerous ravines that provided a haunt for snakes and wandering wolves. The children were warned to avoid them by their mother, but this did not stop Feodor from plunging into the nearby birchwood (called Fedya’s wood by the family) with a delicious shudder of fear. He confided his sensations in a passage in the original version of Poor Folk, later eliminated. I remember that at the back of our garden was a wood, thick, verdant, shadowy. . . . This wood was my favorite place to walk, but I was afraid to go into it very far . . . it seemed as if someone is calling there, as if someone is beckoning there . . . where the smooth stumps of trees are scattered about more blackly and thickly, where the ravine begins. . . . It becomes painful and terrifying, all around nothing but a dead silence; the heart shivers with some sort of obscure feeling, and you continue, you continue farther, carefully. . . . How sharply etched in my memory is that wood, those stealthly walks, and those feelings—a strange mixture of pleasure, childish curiosity and terror (1: 443).

Dostoevsky never forgot his summers in Darovoe, and in 1877, shortly after returning there to visit for the first time since his childhood, he wrote of that tiny and unimportant spot [which] left a very deep and strong impression on me for the remainder of my life.²⁴ Names of places, and of people he knew there, constantly turn up in his work, most abundantly in The Brothers Karamazov, which he was beginning to think of at the time of his belated return to the scenes of his youth. The village harbored a durochka, a female half-wit named Agrafena, who lived out of doors for most of the year and, in the dead of winter, was forcibly taken in by one peasant family or another. She is the prototype of Lizaveta Smerdyakova, and suffered the same unhappy fate: despite her infirmity, she became pregnant and gave birth to a child who died shortly after birth. Andrey describes her as continually muttering something incomprehensible about her dead child in the cemetery, exactly like another Dostoevskian durochka, Marya Lebyadkina in Demons. Other echoes of these years appear in the dream sequence of Dimitry Karamazov of a village decimated by fire, like the one that broke out in Darovoe in the spring of 1833. The whole estate, writes Andrey, looked like a desert, with charred posts sticking up here and there.²⁵ Each family was given fifty rubles as a loan (a considerable sum in those days) to help in the work of reconstruction, and it is doubtful whether it was ever repaid.

In 1833, Mikhail and Feodor left home to go to Souchard’s day school; a year later they were sent to Chermak’s, the best boarding school in Moscow. The preparation for boarding school was tied up with a particularly trying experience for the two older boys. Mastery of Latin was required at Chermak’s, but Souchard’s had no such instruction, and Dr. Dostoevsky himself decided to fill in the deficiency. These lessons provide Andrey with the most graphic illustration of his father’s hair-trigger temper. At the slightest error of [my] brothers, father always became angry, flew into a passion, called them sluggards and fools; in the most extreme, though rarer, instances, he even broke off the lesson without finishing it, which was considered worse than any punishment.²⁶ Dr. Dostoevsky required his sons to stand stiffly at attention throughout the Latin drill. From this we may conclude that he had already decided to enroll them in a military establishment and was trying to accustom them to the rigors of martial discipline. No doubt, as Andrey remarks, his brothers were very much afraid of these lessons.²⁷

The transition from home to school, and particularly to boarding school, came as a rude shock to Feodor. Despite his father’s flare-ups, home was still a comfortable and familiar place, and his mother a perpetual source of consolation. The words of the heroine of Poor Folk evoke what was probably Dostoevsky’s reaction to the new world of the school. I would sit over my French translation or vocabularies, not daring to move and dreaming all the while of our little home, of father, of mother, of our old nurse, of nurse’s stories (1: 28). Another reminiscence of this initiation may be contained in the image of Alyosha Karamazov surrounded by his schoolmates, who forcibly held his hands from his ears, and shouted obscenities into them (9: 23). The Dostoevsky children had lived in a peasant village and were certainly familiar with the facts of life, but they had been shielded from a knowledge of vice and perversity. Andrey remembers his own introduction to such matters by his schoolfellows with distaste. There was no nastiness, no abominable vice, which was not taught to the innocent youngsters who had just left the paternal home.²⁸

There is only one independent account that allows us to catch a glimpse of Dostoevsky in his school years. On the first day I arrived, writes a slightly younger student, I gave way to a surge of childish despair on finding myself . . . exposed to their taunts. During the recreation period, . . . Dostoevsky . . . chased away the mocking scamps, and began to console me. . . . He often visited me after that in class, guided me in my work, and lightened my sadness by his exciting stories during the recreation period.²⁹ This pattern of behavior illustrates aspects of Dostoevsky’s character that remain constant: his staunch independence, and his willingness to intervene personally against a situation that offended his moral instincts. He was not afraid to spring to the defense of the helpless and persecuted. Dostoevsky’s independence and self-assertiveness were exhibited at home as well. Andrey tells us that Feodor was sometimes so unrestrained in maintaining his own point of view that Dr. Dostoevsky would say, with the wisdom of experience, Really, Fedya, control yourself, you’ll get into trouble . . . and end up under the red cap,³⁰ that is, wearing the headgear of the convict regiments of the Russian Army. Dostoevsky did serve in such a regiment after his release from prison camp in 1854.

The routine of these years of schooling was as invariable as those of early childhood. Every weekend the older boys returned home, and once the first excitement of reunion was over there was little else to do except read and supervise the assignments handed out the week before to their younger brothers and sisters. Visits were still restricted to the immediate family, nor were the older boys ever allowed to go out unaccompanied or given pocket money. Such restraints, however, were merely the custom of the times and the society.

The last four years of Dostoevsky’s life in Moscow were darkened by his mother’s illness, which took a sharp turn for the worse in the fall of 1836. Medical consultations were held every day by the doctor and his colleagues, and the visits of relatives succeeded each other in a never-ending and exhausting file. This was the bitterest time in the childhood period of our lives, writes Andrey. We were about to lose our mother any minute. . . . Father was totally destroyed. Just before the end, Marya Feodorovna regained consciousness, called for the icon of the Savior, and then blessed her children and her husband. It was a moving scene and we all wept, Andrey recalls.³¹

But it was not only the impending crisis in his family life that troubled Feodor during his last two years at home; he also knew that he was destined for a career repugnant to his deepest inclinations. Dr. Dostoevsky had decided that his two older sons were to be military engineers, and in the fall of 1836 he submitted a request through his hospital superior for their admission to the Academy of Military Engineers in St. Petersburg at government expense. Both Mikhail and Feodor were dreaming of literary fame and fortune, but once their father’s request was granted, the die was cast. No doubt this decision stirred up a good deal of resentment and hostility, particularly in the fiery Feodor; but this was blunted by the lesson so often hammered home to the Dostoevsky children by their father. He often repeated that he was a poor man, Andrey observes, that his children, especially the younger ones, had to be ready to make their own way, that they would remain impoverished at his death, etc.³² The post of military engineer offered solid financial advantages, and Dr. Dostoevsky believed he was doing the best he could for his offspring.

What little we know of Dostoevsky in these years makes it likely that he began to chafe very early under the restricting atmosphere of his home life and the necessity of knuckling under to a rigidly inflexible and emotionally unstable father who tended to identify his own wishes with the sacred dictates of God himself. Such feelings of disaffection, however, were certainly counterbalanced both by the natural inclination to accept and revere paternal authority and, as Feodor grew older, by his growing awareness of Dr. Dostoevsky’s genuine dedication to the welfare of his family. For while the burdens that Dr. Dostoevsky imposed on his children were heavy indeed, their future, as they well knew, was at the center of his preoccupations; nor did he ever allow them to forget that his laborious life was devoted to their interests. Moreover, the adolescent Dostoevsky probably could sense his father’s anxieties behind the stiff and official authoritarian façade.

Dostoevsky’s only direct utterance about his father while the latter was still alive is made in a letter to Mikhail; and its mixture of pity with some impatience reveals Dostoevsky’s ambivalence. I feel sorry for our poor father, he writes. A strange character! Oh, how much unhappiness he has had to bear! I could weep from bitterness that there is nothing to console him. But, do you know, Papa doesn’t know the world at all. He has lived in it for 50 years and retains the same ideas about people as 30 years ago. Happy ignorance! But he is very disillusioned with it. That seems our common fate.³³ This was written after the death of Marya Feodorovna had deprived Dr. Dostoevsky of his sole sustaining support in the midst of his woes; but it surely represents an opinion that his son had begun to form long before.

If we are to seek for some image of Dostoevsky’s father in his works, it is useless to go to the creations of his maturity; whatever father figures we find there are too much intertwined with later experiences and ideological motifs to have any biographical value. But the picture given of Varvara’s father in Poor Folk comes straight from Dostoevsky’s still-fresh memories of his youth, and is steeped in the details of his daily life. I tried my very utmost to learn and please father. I saw he was spending his last farthing on me and God knows what straits he was in. Every day he grew more gloomy, more ill-humored, more angry. . . . Father would begin saying that I was no joy, no comfort to them; that they were depriving themselves of everything for my sake and I could not speak French yet; in fact all his failures, all his misfortunes were vented on me and mother. . . . I was to blame for everything, I was responsible for everything! And this was not because father did not love me; he was devoted to mother and me, but it was just his character (1: 29). It is likely that Dostoevsky had heard just such reproaches on numerous occasions, and had tried to excuse them in his heart in the same way. He depicts his father not as a brutal and heartless despot but as a harassed and finally pitiable figure driven to desperation by the difficulties of his situation.

Some of the traits of Dr. Dostoevsky, drawn at this time with a satirical rather than a pathetic pen, can also be found in the first version of another early work, Netotchka Nezvanova. A character named Feodor Ferapontovich, a minor civil service official, constantly reproaches his children for ingratitude. Turning to his little children, he would ask them in a threatening and reproachful voice: ‘What have they done for all the kindness he had shown them? Have they recompensed him, by assiduous study and impeccable pronunciation of French, for all his sleepless nights, all his labors, all his blood, for anything? for anything?’ In other words, Feodor Ferapontovich . . . every evening turned his house into a little hell. The qualities in his character held up to ridicule are attributed to some sort of hidden suffering: whether from the fact that he had been hurt, or cut down by somebody, some kind of secret enemy who constantly insulted his self-respect, and so forth (2: 444). One can imagine the young Dostoevsky speculating in much the same way about the sources of his father’s more galling peculiarities.

Certain traits of Dostoevsky’s character may be attributed to the effects of his relationship with his father. All the people who had any prolonged personal contact with Dostoevsky remark on the secretiveness and evasiveness of his personality; he was not someone who opened himself easily or willingly to others. There is scarcely a memoir about him that does not comment on this lack of expansiveness, and one suspects that this elusiveness may well have developed from the need to dissimulate as a means of coping with his father’s combination of capriciousness and severity. The pathological shyness from which Dostoevsky suffered all his life can possibly also be attributed to an unwillingness to expose himself, a fear of being rebuffed and emotionally abused that had become second nature.

Most important of all, as Freud noted, is that Dostoevsky internalized as a child a highly developed sense of guilt. Instead of Oedipal sexual rivalry, however, it is more helpful, at this stage of Dostoevsky’s life, to view his guilt feelings in the light of the paternal insistence on scholastic achievement as a moral obligation, and as the only defense against grinding poverty and loss of status. The importance given to this aspect of life in the family is well illustrated by a ceremony that took place every year on Dr. Dostoevsky’s name day (and which later turns up in The Village of Stepanchikovo, performed for Colonel Rostanev, a father of ideal kindness). The two older boys and eventually the oldest girl prepared a morning greeting for their father on that joyous occasion. This meant memorizing a French poem, copying it on fine paper, presenting it to their father, and then reciting it by heart—with as good an accent as they could muster—while he followed with the written text. Father was very touched, Andrey says, and warmly kissed the purveyor of greetings;³⁴ clearly the most welcome present he could receive was this evidence of their progress in learning French.

Dostoevsky’s genius first reveals itself by the creation of characters desperately eager to satisfy their bureaucratic superiors in some routine clerical task (not so far removed from schoolwork, after all); consumed with guilt at their velleities of rebellion; and oppressed by their sense of social inferiority. No wonder! All through his childhood, Dostoevsky had been placed psychically in exactly the same position by his father, and by the obvious social situation of his family.

The ambivalence of Dostoevsky’s emotions about his father was also, unquestionably, of the greatest significance for his future. No doubt it was in the fluctuations of his own psyche between resentment and filial piety that he first glimpsed the psychological paradoxes whose exploration became the hallmark of his genius. And one can locate the emotive roots of his Christian ideal in the evident desire of the young Dostoevsky to resolve this ambivalence by an act of self-transcendence, a sacrifice of the ego through identification with the other (in this case, his father). Whether one calls such a sacrifice moral masochism, as Freud did, or, more traditionally, moral self-conquest, the fact remains that Dostoevsky as a boy and youth was not only hostile and inimical to his father but also struggled to understand and to forgive him. This struggle then became fused with the Christian images and ideals that he was taught from the very first moment that he awoke consciously to life. All of Dostoevsky’s later values can thus be seen as deriving from the synthesis of this early psychic need with the religious superstructure that gave it a universal and cosmic import, and elevated it to the stature of the fulfillment of man’s destiny on earth.

¹ DW (January 1877); see also, for the self-comparison with Tolstoy, F. M. Dostoevsky, The Notebooks for A Raw Youth, ed. Edward Wasiolek, trans. Victor Terras (Chicago, 1969), 425, 544–545.

² ZT, 21.

³ A. M. Dostoevsky, Vospominaniya (Leningrad, 1930), 17–18.

⁴ DVS, 1: 44.

⁵ DW (1873, no. 1), 6.

⁶ Pis’ma, 2: 549; August 16, 1839.

⁷ V. S. Nechaeva, V seme i usadbe Dostoevskikh (Moscow, 1939), 109.

⁸ Ibid., 5.

⁹ DVS, 1: 76.

¹⁰ Nechaeva, V seme, 77.

¹¹ DVS, 1: 87.

¹² Nechaeva, V seme, 81.

¹³ Ibid., 99.

¹⁴ Ibid., 106.

¹⁵ Ibid.

¹⁶ Ibid., 109.

¹⁷ Ibid., 111.

¹⁸ DVS, 1: 55, 57.

¹⁹ Ibid., 57.

²⁰ DZhP, 33.

²¹ DVS, 1: 64.

²² Nechaeva, V seme, 83.

²³ DVS, 1: 209. Tolstoy’s second son, Ilya, born in 1866, writes in his memoirs: "The world was divided into two parts, one composed of ourselves and the other of everyone else. We were special people and the others were not our equals. . . . It was mostly maman, of course, who was guilty of entertaining such notions, but papa, too, jealously guarded us from association with the village children. He was responsible to a considerable degree for the groundless arrogance and self-esteem that such an upbringing inculcated into us, and from which I found it so hard to free myself." Edward Crankshaw, Tolstoy: The Making of a Novelist (New York, 1974), 253.

²⁴ DW (July–August 1877), 752.

²⁵ DVS, 1: 72.

²⁶ Ibid., 76.

²⁷ Ibid.

²⁸ Ibid., 75.

²⁹ DZhP, 26.

³⁰ DVS, 1: 82.

³¹ Ibid., 83–84.

³² Ibid., 84.

³³ Pis’ma, 1: 52; October 31, 1838.

³⁴ DVS, 1: 59.

CHAPTER 3

The Religious and Cultural Background

Dostoevsky’s contemporary, Alexander Herzen, remarks in his memoirs that nowhere does religion play so modest a role in education as in Russia.¹ Herzen was, of course, talking about the education of the male children of the landed or service aristocracy, whose parents had been raised for several generations on the culture of the French Enlightenment and for whom Voltaire had been a kind of patron saint. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, such parents had long since ceased to be concerned about Orthodox Christianity, even though they continued to baptize their children in the state religion and to structure their lives in accordance with its rituals. The war years and the post-Napoleonic period, in Russia as elsewhere, were marked by a wave of emotionalism and a revival of religion. But in Russia this stimulated the growth of Freemasonry and various revivalist sects rather than any massive return to the official faith. Most upper-class Russians would have shared the attitude exemplified in Herzen’s anecdote about his host at a dinner party who, when asked whether he was serving Lenten dishes out of personal conviction, replied that it was simply and solely for the sake of the servants.²

Parents with such ideas would scarcely consider it indispensable to provide their offspring with any kind of formal religious education. It was only at fifteen (after he had read Voltaire, as Herzen remarks) that Herzen’s father brought in a priest to give religious instruction so far as this was necessary for entrance into the University.³ Tolstoy, though raised largely by devout female relatives, was also never given any religious education as a child. Turgenev’s monstrous mother held the religion of the common people in such contempt that, instead of the usual prayers, she substituted each day at table the reading of a French translation of Thomas à Kempis.

Only against such a background can one appreciate the full force of Dostoevsky’s quiet words: I came from a pious Russian family. . . . In our family, we knew the Gospel almost from the cradle.⁴ This is, as we know from Andrey, literally true: the children were all taught to read by their mother from a well-known eighteenth-century religious primer, translated from the German and titled One Hundred and Four Sacred Stories from the Old and New Testaments. Coarse lithographs accompanying the text depicted various episodes from the scriptures—the creation of the world, Adam and Eve in Paradise, the Flood, the raising of Lazarus, the rebellion of Job the just man against God. The very first impressions that awakened the consciousness of the child were those embodying the teachings of the Christian faith, and the world thereafter for Dostoevsky would always remain transfigured by the glow of this supernatural illumination. Dostoevsky was to say later that the problem of the existence of God had tormented him all his life; but this only confirms that it was always emotionally impossible for him to accept a world that had no relation to a God of any kind.

One of his earliest childhood memories was that of saying his prayers before the icons in the presence of admiring guests. I put all my trust in Thee, O Lord! the child intoned. Mother of God, keep me and preserve me under Thy wing!⁵ In the Dostoevsky household, such a childish performance of a religious ritual was evidently a source of pride and social satisfaction. To reinforce the effect of this early religious initiation, a deacon came to the house regularly to give formal instruction. This clergyman also taught at the neighboring Catherine Institute for Girls, a fashionable school for daughters of the aristocracy; and this meant that, unlike the majority of the Russian non-monastic clergy, he would have been highly literate. He possessed an uncommon verbal gift, writes Andrey, and the entire lesson . . . was spent telling stories, or, as we called it, interpreting the Scriptures.⁶ The children also were required to study the introduction to religion composed by the metropolitan Filaret, whose first sentence Andrey still remembers after more than half a century: The One God, worshipped in the Holy Trinity, is eternal, that is, has no beginning nor end to his being, but always was, is, and will be.⁷ The attempt of theologians to rationalize the mysteries of faith, it would appear, never held any appeal for Dostoevsky. What stirred his feelings to the depths was the story of the Advent as a divine-human narrative full of character and action—as an account of real people living and responding with passion and fervor to the word of God.

Religion not only loomed large because of its manifest status in the eyes of his parents and relatives, it was also involved quite naturally with the most exciting experiences of his earliest years, the events that stood out as joyful breaks in his monotonous and laborious routine. The name of Dostoevsky has become so inalterably associated with that of St. Petersburg that one tends to forget he was born in Moscow—the city of innumerable churches, of everlasting bells, of endless processions, of palace and church combined, the city that the peasants called our Holy Mother.⁸ The beating heart of all this intense religious life was the Kremlin; and whenever the Dostoevsky family went for an outing in the city, they invariably directed their steps toward this sacred spot. Every visit to the Kremlin and the Moscow cathedrals, Dostoevsky remembered later, was, for me, something very solemn.⁹ Time and again he wandered through its forest of bulbous cupolas, listened to the many-tongued harmony of its bell towers, contemplated its treasured relics and richly decorated cathedrals, from whose walls the Orthodox saints, as the much-traveled Théophile Gautier saw them, stared down with eyes that seemed to menace, though their arms extended to bless.¹⁰

The stout walls and crenelated battlements of the Kremlin bore mute testimony to its function as a fortress as well as a religious sanctuary, and reminded the onlooker that it was not only a place of sacred worship but also a monument to Russia’s historical grandeur. The God-anointed tsars were crowned in the Cathedral of the Assumption; another church contained the sepulchers of all the past rulers of Russia, who, clothed in flowing white robes and with a halo encircling their head, appeared on the wall above each tomb. In Russia, as a student of its ecclesiastical history reminds us, the national and religious elements have been identified far more closely than in the West,¹¹ and one of the great landmarks of this symbiosis is the Kremlin. The Russian struggle against foreign invaders—whether pagan Tartar, Mohammedan Turk, German or Polish Catholic, or Swedish Lutheran—has always been a struggle on behalf of the Orthodox faith. By the early nineteenth century the two powerful idea-feelings of religion and nationalism had been inseparable for Russians for a thousand years. One can well understand how they must have blended together in Dostoevsky’s consciousness, during these childhood excursions, into an inextricable mélange of ardor and devotion that he later found it impossible to disentangle.

Up until the age of ten, when his parents acquired their small property in the country, Dostoevsky and his brothers and sisters left the city only once a year. Mme Dostoevsky always took the older children, accompanied by some relatives or friends, for an annual spring excursion to the monastery of the Trinity and St. Sergey about sixty miles from Moscow. This journey required several days by carriage and terminated